from the censor-now! dept

A few years ago, we mocked then Senator Joe Lieberman's request that internet companies put "report this content as terrorist content" buttons on various types of online content. The plan went nowhere, because it's a really bad idea, prone to massive abuse. Yet, over in the UK, some apparently think it's such a grand idea that they're actually moving forward with it. This isn't a huge surprise -- the current UK government has been going on for quite some time about banning "extremist" content, and just recently ramped up such efforts.

The UK’s major Internet service providers – BT, Virgin, Sky and Talk Talk – have this week committed to host a public reporting button for terrorist material online, similar to the reporting button which allows the public to report child sexual exploitation.

They have also agreed to ensure that terrorist and extremist material is captured by their filters to prevent children and young people coming across radicalising material.

I love the term "radicalising material" as if it's the material itself that has the power to magically turn mild-mannered Brits into violent jihadis just by appearing on their screens. That's not how it works. Yet some have such an irrational fear of the power of words we disagree with that it must be prevented from anyone ever seeing it.

Also, the comparison to child porn is a common one, but wrong. Images of sexually exploited children are not a judgment call issue, for the most part. It's an obvious thing. "Extremist" material or "terrorist" material, on the other hand, is almost entirely subjective. And, over time, the definition of what counts always seems to expand, rather than contract. And that doesn't even take into account how many people will simply choose to use such buttons to try to censor any sort of content they dislike.

Addressing a special sitting of federal parliament, Cameron said: “We must not allow the internet to be an ungoverned space”.

Why? What's wrong with letting people speak their minds? The whole "terrorism!" claim is overplayed:

“In both our countries we have seen some of our young people radicalised, going off to fight in Iraq and Syria, and even appalling plots to murder innocent people back in our own countries.”

Yes, but perhaps you should look at the root causes of why that's happening? But Cameron insists it can't possibly be poverty or UK foreign policy:

“And let us be frank. It’s not poverty, though of course our nations are united in tackling deprivation wherever it exists. It’s not exclusion from the mainstream. Of course we have more to do but we are both successful multicultural democracies where opportunities abound.

“And it’s not foreign policy. I can show you examples all over the world where British aid and British action have saved millions of Muslim lives, from Kosovo to Syria – but that is not exactly the real point. In our democracies, we must never give in to the idea that disagreeing with a foreign policy in any way justifies terrorist outrages.”

Hmm. So disagreeing with foreign policy cannot justify terrorist outrages... but, apparently it can justify blatant censorship. Because, apparently, the only possible reason why people are radicalized is because they read something on the internet. David Cameron insists that's the case:

The root cause was in fact the “extremist narrative”, Cameron said.

This meant “we must ban extremist preachers from our country, we must root out extremism from our schools, universities and prisons”, as well as dealing with the internet.

So he presents no actual evidence, but completely waves off poverty and disagreements over UK foreign policy as being non-factors -- and then automatically assumes that the problem is "extremist" speech online? Incredible.

And the end result is pure censorship. How long until calling it censorship is considered an "extremist" position as well?

from the a-new-wave-of-data-brokers dept

Just how many entities have their hands on your data when the NSA makes requests? Well, it's not just the service providers and any number of analysts at the NSA. There's a whole industry subset of third parties that actually handle requests, implement wiretaps, direct searches for communications/data and deliver this information to the intelligence agency.

With permission from their ISP customers, these third-parties discreetly wiretap their networks at the behest of law enforcement agencies, like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and even intelligence agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA).

By implementing these government data requests with precision and accuracy, trusted third-parties — like Neustar, Subsentio, and Yaana — can turn reasonable profits for their services.

Little is known about these types of companies, which act as outsourced data brokers between small and major U.S. ISPs and phone companies, and the federal government. Under the 1994 law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), any company considered a "communications provider" has to allow government agencies access when a valid court order is served. No matter how big or small, even companies whose legal and financial resources are limited do not escape federal wiretapping laws.

Subpoenas, search warrants, court orders -- even those from the FISA court -- run through these trusted third parties. From the information Whittaker has gathered, this market seems to have evolved out of limited legal resources retained by smaller ISPs and service providers. Incoming requests are forwarded to these companies, which vet them for legal issues and determine what exactly needs to be done to satisfy them. Some of this is just CYA -- an extra insulating layer to serve as a buffer between the service provider and the possibly aggrieved customer(s). Some of it is due to practicality. Smaller ISPs and service providers do not retain lawyers with the security clearance needed to inspect/challenge certain orders.

One of those attorneys, who declined to be named for the story because the person holds top-secret security clearance, explained that although hundreds of lawyers have the same clearance — including those serving terror suspects in Guantanamo Bay — very few have been in front of the FISA Court to defend their clients. These clearance-holding lawyers have been in high demand over the past year representing major Silicon Valley companies implicated in the NSA's surveillance programs.

For the majority of smaller companies (as well as larger ones, who have refused to comment on challenging such warrants), complying with data demands may be their only option. The vast majority, however, do not have the resources to handle such requests.

"If they don't have an internal lawyer [reviewing FISA warrants], they could use a third-party service. That third-party can't provide legal advice, but it can create a system for reviewing the data, pulling, and processing the data," the security clearance-holding attorney said.

Because these companies have the sort of clearance the ISPs lack, smaller ISPs are often nothing more than dumb terminals for government agencies to manipulate. The trusted third parties are often the only entities that see certain court orders and requests, and ISP participation in the approval and response processes is often non-existent. In many cases, the ISP cannot even see the court order it's being directed to comply with.

"Of what worth is our permission when we don't even know what we're being asked to give access to?" a senior staffer at [ISP] Cbeyond admitted.

In the unlikely event that a request is rejected, it's usually done by the third parties, again without the participation of the ISP itself. The trusted third parties are better equipped -- in terms of legal team security clearance -- to do this than smaller ISPs are, but that additional expertise is of little use should ISPs decide to directly challenge a court order.

If the ISP or phone company decides to fight a warrant, the third-party can stand back and wash its hands of it.

Burr said Neustar "has and will" reject subpoenas that are inadequate for one reason or another. But should its clients choose to fight a FISA warrant or court order it believes to be overbroad, Neustar will not join the battle in court.

Other trusted third-parties take a similar approach.

"We're out of the picture," said Marcus Thomas, chief technology officer at Subsentio, another trusted third-party company, founded in 2004, and based out of Littleton, Colorado.

While the third parties may be collecting money from ISPs for handling data and intercept requests, their desire to stay in the government's good graces appears to outweigh any loyalty to the businesses that retain their services.

"It's the provider's problem," [Yaana Executive VP Tony] Rutkowski said. "The nice part about the trusted third-party business is that just from a liability standpoint, we don't want to be left holding the bag here." [Yaana CTO David] Grootwassink agreed. "We provide the gears. We don't get involved in fights between the governments and our clients."

And therein lies part of the problem. While it may be easier to turn over what is largely a compliance function to third parties, there's very little oversight into these companies' actions and processes. Even the ISPs that hire them seem to have limited insight into what's actually being done. These go-betweens have carefully dodged liability by refusing to be involved in legal challenges, leaving underequipped ISPs to fight their own battles. While some trusted third parties have issued transparency reports detailing the requests they've facilitated, this basically leaves the public to perform the oversight, something of very limited use. About all the public can do is switch providers, which, if even an option, only puts them in the hands of another company using the same practices.

from the because-it's-comcast dept

David Kravets, over at Ars Technica, has a good post detailing how Comcast is doing questionable packet injection to put its own javascript ads onto websites if you're surfing via Comcast's public WiFi access points. The practice was spotted by Ryan Singel, who saw the following "XFINITY WIFI: Peppy" ad scoot across his screen:

Comcast, in typical Comcast fashion, appears to be totally and completely oblivious as to why this could possibly be seen as a problem:

A Comcast spokesman told Ars the program began months ago. One facet of it is designed to alert consumers that they are connected to Comcast's Xfinity service. Other ads remind Web surfers to download Xfinity apps, Comcast spokesman Charlie Douglas told Ars in telephone interviews.

The advertisements may appear about every seven minutes or so, he said, and they last for just seconds before trailing away. Douglas said the advertising campaign only applies to Xfinity's publicly available Wi-Fi hot spots that dot the landscape. Comcast customers connected to their own Xfinity Wi-Fi routers when they're at home are not affected, he said.

"We think it's a courtesy, and it helps address some concerns that people might not be absolutely sure they're on a hotspot from Comcast," Douglas said.

It's a courtesy to hijack the page a person asked for and insert something that no one asked for on it? I don't think so. There's a reason that packet injection is considered an attack and a security risk -- and it's got nothing to do with courtesy.

Certainly, the website that Singel was browsing when he spotted it, Mediagzer, was not pleased about having its own site hijacked and defaced:

"Indeed, they were not ours," Gabe Rivera, who runs Mediagazer and Techmeme, said in an e-mail. In another e-mail, he said, "someone else is inserting them in a sneaky way."

Kravets also talks to Robb Topolski, the guy who first provided the evidence to show that Comcast was throttling BitTorrent a while back, kicking off one of the first big net neutrality fights (which resulted in the FCC slapping Comcast's wrists). Topolski notes that what they're doing here is technically equivalent:

To Topolski, what Comcast is now doing is no different from before: Comcast is adding data into the broadband packet stream. In 2007, it was packets serving up disconnection commands. Today, Comcast is inserting JavaScript that is serving up advertisements, according to Topolski, who reviewed Singel's data.

"It's the duty of the service provider to pull packets without treating them or modifying them or injecting stuff or forging packets. None of that should be in the province of the service provider," he said. "Imagine every Web page with a Comcast bug in the lower righthand corner. It's the antithesis of what a service provider is supposed to do. We want Internet access, not another version of cable TV."

But, of course, to the big broadband players, the last few years have been all about them trying to make the internet much more like cable TV, where they get to act as the gatekeepers and have much more control. The ability to inject their own ads into various webpages is just another bonus.

from the rethinking-collective-bargaining dept

A random factoid about my past that some people don't know is that I have a degree in "industrial and labor relations," which involved an awful lot of learning about the history of unions, collective bargaining and the like. While I firmly believe that most unions today are counterproductive (frequently holding back innovation and flexibility), the idea certainly made quite a lot of sense in the early days, in which you had parties (giant employers) with near total market power over employees who had absolutely no market power. Basically, many companies were market abusers, and they abused freely. Organizing workers for collective bargaining was a way to even the playing field slightly. That it later resulted in vast amounts of corruption and cronyism, let alone hindering the way in which companies could innovate and adapt, are certainly big issues to be concerned about -- but there were reasons why that happened as well (driven by leadership on both sides).

But, still, when you have a vast mismatch in market power, with one side being an effective monopoly, and the other side being dispersed among many people, there is a certain appeal to collective bargaining. And that appears to be the root appeal of an idea percolating over on Reddit right now for an ISP Consumers Union, inspired by a Reddit comment from a few days ago. The basic thinking is that if the FCC and Congress aren't all that interested in preventing big broadband company fuckery, then perhaps the consumers should take it into their own hands, join forces, and negotiate as a unified force with the ISPs. A bunch of folks have jumped into the discussion and are talking about a variety of different facets, from what the "union" would have the power to do to the legal issues to the administrative aspects of the whole thing.

There's something profoundly interesting about this from a few different angles. I have no idea if something like this will actually come together for real, let alone work, but the effective "market conditions" do match those that led to the rise of organized labor, with a few "monopolists" abusing their power to treat people (in that case, workers, in this case, broadband subscribers) poorly. The situation is certainly not identical, but there are parallels. Broadband access today is certainly considered by many to be as important as a job a century ago. In fact, many consider it essential to having a job. And, yet, there remain very few broadband providers and the big ones all have pretty long histories of abusive practices. That said, the "abuses" certainly pale in comparison to the way that big oil and steel companies treated workers in the late 19th century, but it's not a completely crazy concept.

Would people care enough to make a difference? And what legitimate bargaining power would they have? People could "strike" by cancelling their service. Or they could organize to move en masse to a competitor -- if there is a competitor. The whole concept is undeniably fascinating. While I'd still worry about the same ills that later plagued (and still plague, though not always to the same levels) organized labor, one would hope that with some knowledge of what went wrong there, an ISP Consumers Union could avoid some of those pitfalls. Frankly, the biggest problem with unions (and, again, this was often driven by company management) was viewing "management" and "labor" as being diametrically opposed forces, rather than different parties with different needs but an overall focus on a similar goal. That is, even when labor hated management, driving a big company out of business entirely was certainly worse than figuring out ways to get things done. The problem was that the two sides were often so antagonistic, that bargaining itself became a war of spite, rather than each side understanding the overall issues, and working out compromises so that everyone could be better off.

It's entirely possible that an ISP Consumer Union could eventually be plagued by similar issues -- making unwarranted demands on broadband providers that make it impossible for them to remain in business. But, as a way to hack around the current (failed) politics of net neutrality, and present an alternative option, one that is much more bottom up than top down, is absolutely fascinating.

At the same time, it's also profoundly depressing that broadband consumers of today have that much in common with laborers at the dawn of the industrial revolution...

from the truly-remarkable dept

Two years ago, Techdirt noted the price that Switzerland paid for daring to suggest that unauthorized file-sharing really wasn't such a problem: it was put on the USTR naughty step, aka the "Special 301 list." A post on Intellectual Property Watch explains the current copyright situation in Switzerland:

Anybody can download a movie or a soundtrack and share it with his family in the realm of the private sphere. The downloaded movie or soundtrack cannot, however, be made public on the internet -- for example through a social media platform -- or transmitted to third persons, the [Swiss] official said.

Switzerland is in the process of revising its copyright laws, and you might expect that by now it has been "persuaded" by the US to change its mind about allowing people to download files freely and share them in this way, but to its credit, that doesn't seem to be the case (pdf). Here's what the official Swiss working group carrying out the review of copyright, known as AGUR12, is recommending:

In view of the measures proposed below... downloading from illegal sources, as provided for in current law according to the prevailing doctrine, should remain legal.

The proposed measures mentioned there concern new responsibilities for ISPs, designed to help remove unauthorized online content. These include "takedown":

Hosting providers should remove content that has been illegally uploaded when notified to do so by the rights holder or a competent authority.

"Staydown":

Hosting providers, whose business model is clearly designed for the infringement of copyright by users, or who intentionally promote running the risk of performing illegal acts through measures or omissions for which they are responsible, need to remove illegally uploaded content when notified to do so by the rights holder and take all reasonable measures to prevent any further illegal uploading of such content.

And blocking:

On the order of the authorities, access providers located in Switzerland need, in serious cases, to block access to web portals that feature obvious illegal sources by means of IP and DNS blocking. The blocking of approved content along with unapproved content (overblocking) is to be avoided, as far as possible, by the competent authorities. All blocking measures are to be made publicly known in
an appropriate form by the competent authorities and they may not compromise the technical functionality of the IP or DNS system.

AGUR12 also proposes introducing a new warning system for users, which concerns sharing materials on P2P networks:

An overzealous enforcement of the law is problematic and is perceived as being aggressive because internet users are often unclear about the legal situation. Prior notification may remedy this. It is therefore important to create the possibility for access providers to issue a one-off notification, when notified by the rights holder or a competent authority, to owners of internet connections who seriously infringe copyright by using peer-to-peer networks. Rights owners should adequately compensate access providers for the costs incurred for delivering such notification. Upon receipt of the notification, the subscriber will then have to take appropriate steps to prevent continued use of his connection for
copyright infringement via peer-to-peer networks in order to avoid facing joint civil liability in the event of recurrence. To this end, the necessary legal basis is to be established and a guarantee of judicial review is to be observed; in particular, ISPs and consumer organisations must have the possibility of appealing to the competent authority upon notification from a rights holder.

As these excerpts of the recommended changes indicate, while revising their laws for the digital age, the Swiss seem to be keen to maintain their refreshingly moderate and rational approach to copyright. Which doubtless means that we can expect to see the country placed on the Special 301 list for some years to come.

from the more-porn-for-the-rest-of-us! dept

To call the UK's institution of ISP-level web filters "stupid" isn't just being blithely dismissive. For one, they don't work. They block the wrong stuff. They let offensive stuff in. They're easily circumvented. They're advance scouts for government censorship. The only people who think web filtering is a good thing are those with the power to turn pet projects into national laws.

Broadband customers are overwhelmingly choosing not to use parental-control systems foisted on ISPs by the government - with take-up in the single digits for three of the four major broadband providers…

Only 5% of new BT customers signed up, 8% opted in for Sky and 4% for Virgin Media. TalkTalk rolled out a parental-control system two years before the government required it and has had much better take-up of its offering, with 36% of customers signing up for it.

Those pushing for filters would have you believe it's something the public has been clamoring for to help them protect their children from the many evils of the internet. In reality, hardly anyone appears to care all that deeply about hooking up to a pre-censored connection.

There's more than simply unpopularity going on here. The numbers skew low for several reasons. At this point, the rollout isn't 100% complete and isn't being offered to every new customer (something that becomes a requirement in 2015). Virgin Media (somewhat ironically) has been hooking customers up with the filthiest internet. Techs for that company have only been presenting the "unavoidable choice" to a little over a third of its new signups. Other ISPs techs have been more thorough, presenting new customers with the option nearly every time.

Many service providers say it's also possible the filtering has been activated post-installation (Ofcom's report only tracks filtering enabled at the time of install) or that customers are already using device-based filters.

Despite all of these factors, I wouldn't expect adoption numbers to rise much. People generally don't like the government telling them what they can and can't access. Illegal content is already blocked at ISP level (as well as by several search engines), so what's being added is nothing more than a governmental parent to watch over citizens' shoulders as they surf the web. Those with children would probably prefer to run an open pipe and filter content at the device level. Not everyone in a household needs to be treated like a child, which is exactly what these filters (and their proponents) do.

Beyond that, activating a web filter goes against human nature, especially the exertion of free will and the general avoidance of embarrassment. Most people view themselves as "good" and uninterested in the long list of internet vices (porn being the most popular). But even if they truly believe they'd never view this content, they'd rather have it arrive unfiltered than be forced to approach their ISP weeks (or minutes…) later like a bit-starved Oliver Twist and ask, "Please, sir. May I have some porn?"

from the definition-of-insanity dept

I first became aware of The Pirate Bay in 2006 when the site was raided by Swedish law enforcement and taken offline for a few days. Of course, the site came back online soon after, and all of the attention from taking it down resulted in a massive increase in awareness and traffic. Over the years, we've noticed a rather obvious pattern here. Every single time we hear about an attack on The Pirate Bay, it seems to get more traffic. In fact, TorrentFreak is reporting that despite all of the various countries that have officially ordered ISPs to block access to the site, traffic to The Pirate Bay has doubled since 2011. In fact, the traffic growth appears to be fairly steady:

The really incredible thing is that, eight years after the initial raid, despite multiple lawsuits (even people in jail) and a variety of ISP blockades, it appears that the entertainment industry still hasn't learned a damn thing about understanding why people like The Pirate Bay and why its efforts to take it down keep failing. The industry's infatuation turned what had been a little-known Swedish torrent tracking site into a global phenomenon that makes them look worse and worse every time they fail to recognize what's happening.

from the such-is-the-internet dept

We've been highlighting how Italy's public prosecutor has suddenly decided that he gets to be the judge, jury and executioner of any websites he deems to be engaged in copyright infringement. Back in March he ordered dozens of websites to be censored based entirely on his say so. And now he's back with another big list, except this time it includes two very big names: Russian webmail/social networking giant mail.ru and Kim Dotcom's cloud storage provider Mega.nz. No matter what you might think of Kim Dotcom and Megaupload, Mega.nz was clearly set up to be quite different from Megaupload -- and the company is known for being quite responsive to takedown requests.

As for mail.ru, it's owned by Russian oligarch Alisher Usmanov, who (not surprisingly) is a pal of Vladimir Putin. The company put out a statement in which it says it was not informed about any of this and only found out once its users in Italy started complaining. The company is not happy about the situation. "[Eyemoon Pictures] made no attempt to resolve the situation pretrial.... No notification of illegal content or requirements to remove copies of [Eyemoon's] films has been addressed to Mail.Ru Group from law enforcement agencies and Italy."

Fulvio Sarzana, an Italian lawyer who follows these things (and first alerted us to the news) is claiming that these sites have been "seized" by the Italian government. In this context, Sarzana explained via email, the government technically is "seizing" the site, but since they have no actual ability to do so, they order ISPs to block access to them.

The decision came after an Italian film distributor complained that two movies -- that have not yet been released in Italy -- could be found on these sites. But, they could just as easily discover that someone had uploaded such films to YouTube or Dropbox or Amazon's S3 or Gmail. Would the public prosecutor order all of those sites completely blocked with no adversarial hearing whatsoever? If prosecutors in Italy truly believe that these entire sites should be "seized" or blocked in Italy, why not take them to court and hold a trial? Why jump immediately to a complete shutdown of sites used by millions for perfectly legitimate activity, just because someone was able to find two infringing files? The chilling effects in Italy from this kind of activity should be massive. It would appear to make it absolutely impossible to build any kind of internet company that allows any form of user generated content, because on a whim, the government might seize everything.

from the good-for-them dept

For years, people have wondered if one of the best tools to prevent ISPs from behaving too badly in breaking net neutrality would just be public shaming. Netflix has long released data on ISP performance, and then got into some hot water last month when it started directly blaming ISPs for network congestion, leading Verizon to send a cease-and-desist letter. Quartz is reporting that YouTube has been doing something similar, though it's not quite as in-your-face as the Netflix example. If the connection is weak, YouTube displays a blue bar beneath the video, with the words "Experiencing Interruptions?" in white:

Click on the "Find out why" link and you get taken to Google's "Video Quality Report" which tells you some information about your ISP and how congested the network is (or, at least sometimes -- in my case, it tells me it doesn't have enough information about my provider, which happens to be Sonic.net, to determine any results).

Of course, all the public shaming in the world isn't going to matter much if ISPs are free to clog up interconnection points and you have no real competition to go to.

from the elegant-explanations dept

For many years, Techdirt has been covering the dogged efforts of the Australian ISP iiNet to stand up for its users against bullying by the copyright industries. After Hollywood lost its big lawsuit against iiNet back in 2012, things went quiet until recently, when the installation of a new government in Australia has led to years of careful research in the field of copyright being thrown out, and a return to dogma-based policy-making that has no time for the facts.

An interview by Luke Hopewell in Gizmodo Australia with Graham Burke, co-CEO of the Village Roadshow Australia media company, provides further evidence of how Australia is stuck in the past when it comes to copyright. It's striking how it trots out just about every tired and discredited argument in favor of harsher punishment for those allegedly sharing unauthorized files, along with the repeated claim that iiNet is lying:

"What iiNet are saying to govt is 'oh, let's just have everything available at the same time, cinema and everything and the [piracy] problem will go away. They know that's a lie because of the music industry. In June alone there was 1.2 million illegal downloads of music, and that's released at exactly the same time everywhere," Burke said.

News Corp owns 50% of pay television company Foxtel, the outfit with the rights to show Game of Thrones in Australia. At last count during August the company had around 2.5 million subscribers, but despite the show being legally available to them, the News Corp CEO said that 20% of Foxtel customers still chose to watch the show illegally.

This shows that even when they have access to the legal services, a significant number of people turn to illegal downloads, presumably because they are more convenient -- a pretty damning verdict on the state of the commercial offerings. Making everything available immediately won't solve that problem -- only offering well-designed legal services will -- but research shows that easy availability through legal services does cut down the level of illegal filesharing, which is presumably what iiNet is trying to get the Australian government to understand.

Next, Burke comes out with a favorite trope of the copyright maximalists:

Piracy produces less of a financial burden for the music industry, according to Burke. Producing an album only costs around $300,000 at the top end, whereas the cost of making a film in the studio model starts at $5 million, and ranges right up to $200 million for epics like Skyfall, Man of Steel and Avatar to name a few.

Of course, that makes the huge and unjustified assumption that such $200 million "epics" are an indispensable part of cinema. In fact, one of the exciting developments in recent years has been the democratization of film-making through high-quality, low-cost video technology that lets people make films for thousands, not millions, of dollars. As Burke himself points out, piracy isn't really a problem for such productions -- another argument in their favor.

He then moves on to another discredited idea -- three-strike schemes -- plus some more name-calling:

"It's sad that to forward their case, [iiNet] use what they must know is a fabric of lies. They're saying that there's no proof that graduated response works. They're instancing a number of countries where graduated response was frustrated by lobbying and the power of Google, which pays little to no tax in Australia and creates nothing," he said.

Graduated response was not "frustrated by lobbying", it failed because it is an inherently flawed idea, based on fear, not fairness. And it's telling that Burke tries to distract attention from this by introducing Google and its irrelevant tax affairs here, even going so far as to say that Google "creates nothing". Since people use its free services, and in vast numbers, they presumably see value in them, which means that it most certainly does contribute to Australia, just not in the form of making films or music, say. Bizarrely, Burke then goes to accuse iiNet of the same sin:

They [iiNet] are also demonstrating the fact that their business model is predicated on selling time, and of course they want the present regime to continue. [Pirates] have a smorgasbord of content online that they are accessing, and paying iiNet for the systems to do so. This is a company that has produced nothing in Australia."

But iiNet is not a production company, it's an ISP. It provides access to the extraordinary, multi-faceted riches of the online world, of which unauthorized content forms a very small and unimportant part, despite the copyright industries' obsession with this particular component. The amazing possibilities that access opens up to its customers is what iiNet "produces", and it arguably provides rather better value than money spent buying -- sorry, licensing -- a film or two.

Burke saves the best for last:

"If people are given elegant explanations of why [downloading content] is theft, the bulk of people will be reasonable."

Yes, it's the old favorite "filesharing is theft" argument, which is not just wrong, but so widely known to be wrong, that not even "elegant explanations" could ever make it right. Indeed, it's partly because people like Burke continue to make this ridiculous assertion -- as well as casting slurs on anyone that dares to challenge their purely self-interested view of the Internet -- that the general public holds the content industries in such low esteem.